Menu

Share

FREE! THIS POST IS FREE!

*Warning, the information you are about to read may disrupt your carefully manufactured worldview that those sneaky marketers engineered for you. You may experience mixed feelings and even question your entire existence on Planet Earth. You may also feel the urge to like, comment on or share this post, which is perfectly safe even in this newly achieved fragile state.

Whale, whale, whale, hello deer reader, Ironika here! As promised I’m Bach with a juicy new blog post, LITERALLY. With this post I dare you to unplug yourself from the Marketrix. Yes, you may realize that you’ve been sleeping in a tub full of fluff all your life so you will likely be covered with gooey doubts but hey, you’ll become bolder and this time not literally. Although some of you might be getting bolder in both senses of the word but I assure you, I have nothing to do with that, blame Mother Nature.

So last week, the dudes of Whale agency and I went to PLUS (a supermarket in Holland) to get something to quiet the stomach rumbling orchestra in the office. If anybody has an answer to why do I feel the need to over-complicate the description of simple facts, let me know?! OK, so we went to the newly refurbished store, which looks awesome by the way, got some supplies and on the way out we saw THIS:

Deal of the century! Or is it?

The first thing that pops into your mind is probably this: Wow, look at that, you can get 0.5 l more of that delish orange juice for only 1 extra cent, INSANE! Let’s buy like 5 bottles so I can tell all my friends what a great deal I made.And the second is this: LOL, who in their right mind would go for the 500 ml and also the noob who came up with this deal probably made a mistake and he’ll be fired tomorrow. GOTTA GET THEM ALL BEFORE THEY RECOGNIZE!

Here you are, full of pride you buy 5 liters of juice, share your little discovery with 2 more people on your way from the store, (yes only two just in case you decide to go back tomorrow for more, you can’t just let everybody profit from the best deal of the century!) finally you are home and as soon as you see your small fridge you realize: THAT DAMN JUICE EXPIRES IN A COUPLE OF DAYS and you have enough for an entire soccer team so you start drinking it like cray all day until you feel sick of oranges to the point when even thinking about them makes you feel nauseous.

Your experience in a nutshell:You bought way more than you needed, because you fell into the so called price of FREE trap. You’ve been blinded by this “great deal” so you failed to realize that it’s actually not such a great bargain after all. Dan Ariely, a renowned behavioral economist calls this predictable irrationality. (More about him and BE in the following posts)

Plus’s experience: They ordered too many oranges so they had to come up with a clever way to get rid of these. Selling double the amount of the same product for the same price not only helped them get rid of the excess amount of oranges but probably lead to even higher return on investment on freshly squeezed juices, because this way the customers’ switched into buying this product instead of other brands. Their frame of reference was completely disrupted by the “best deal ever”.

There you go, the little secret about how your irrational mind deceives you every time you see the FREE price tag. So next time you consider buying 10 bars of chocolate for the price of 5, LET ME KNOW and I’ll help you get rid of it. Don’t be too hasty unless it’s something tasty!